No box

"Sorry Mr. Mayor, but you will have to sit in the bleachers."

Here at the Clarion Content that is how we picture it going for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The mayor, whose team had wrung a free luxury box for the city of New York out of the Yankees at the new Yankee Stadium, agreed yesterday to let the Yankees sell the box and instead pass the revenue along to the city. Of course, the mayor and his peeps had thought, luxury box=fantastic perk. After all the city was putting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers bonds behind the construction of this stadium, why shouldn't they get a free luxury box? (Apparently, this is SOP for city governments using public funds to build stadiums for billionaires.) Then the investment bankers of lower Manhattan had their CDO~Ponzi schemes collapse like the houses of cards they were, and the city of New York is facing a massive revenue shortfall. Suddenly, a free luxury box at Yankee Stadium for the mayor and his cronies looks a little unseemly.

The mayor's spokesperson insists there was nothing wrong or illegal about the quid pro quo. The mayor is only relinquishing the box because the revenues it can earn the city are more important at this time. E-mail messages revealed to the New York Times show that after the Yankees made concessions over the size of the luxury suite and free food, the team received an additional 250 parking spaces, as well as the rights to three new billboards along the Major Deegan Expressway and the revenue they generate.

Read more here in the New York Times.